a “gatekeeper” to success. A healthy body and mind
is the basic condition, he says, for functioning in a
democracy and “too low a general level of health is
dysfunctional” (quoted in Gerhardt 7). When ill-
ness stands as a metaphor for failure, it symbolizes
deviancy. The sick person has failed to keep well,
failed to keep personal commitments, and failed
to adequately garner support and admiration from
others (Gerhardt 22). The ill in this scenario are
necessarily passive, helpless, and detached from
reality. Therefore, they lack the characteristics to
succeed in the modern world. In Eugene O’Neill’s
play LonG day’s Journey^ into niGht, half of the
Tyrone family suffers from chronic illness. At the
play’s start, Edmund has just learned he suffers from
tuberculosis. His many attempts to find his place in
the world have failed and now, O’Neill seems to be
suggesting, he will find his true calling in death. His
mother, Mary, suffers from a debilitating morphine
addiction; she has failed to face the problems in her
real life, so she uses morphine to dull the emotional
pain this gives her. The morphine, in effect, para-
lyzes her, highlighting the metaphorical paralysis in
which the whole family is trapped.
While the idea that illness represents a kind
of failure is common in discussions of physical ill-
ness, in discussions of mental illness it is practically
normative. Mental illness, as the literary historian
Shoshana Felman has theorized, is like a kind of
blindness, a literally inability to see what is actually
happening. As such, those who are mentally ill are
often shunned because they are incapable of acting
in a way we consider reasonable. In Sylvia Plath’s
The beLL Jar, the protagonist, Esther Greenwood,
loses her ability to function in the real world as the
novel progresses. She cannot “see” who she really
is—a young woman with talent and intelligence. She
feels trapped, not only by her skewed view of the
world but also by the assumptions of those around
her that she could just “decide” to be all right.
That those who, like Esther, are sick because
they want to be or because they deserve it is
another common portrayal of illness in literature.
Disease has long been seen as a form of divine
punishment—a curse well deserved by those who
have fallen sick. Susan Sontag explains that the
ancient Greeks believed illness sprung from super-
natural punishment or demonic possession and that
the accursed must have done something to warrant
this affliction. Early Christians, she writes, had
more moralized notions of disease. Disease was still
viewed as a divine punishment, but now the specific
disease was thought to express the deviant character
of the patient. This view of disease can be seen well
into the 20th century. Tuberculosis, for instance, was
long believed to result from too much passion, while
cancer was thought to result from the suppression of
passion (Sontag 21). AIDS, with its most common
methods of transmission involving behavior consid-
ered deviant by most (homosexual intercourse, the
use of intravenous drugs), has been referred to as
a “punishment from God” by ignorant, fearful crit-
ics. In Tony Kushner’s anGeLs in aMerica, Roy
Cohn, the closeted homosexual lawyer diagnosed
with AIDS, certainly feels this way. He is ashamed
of his disease and does everything he can to hide
it. Prior Walter, on the other hand, also diagnosed
with AIDS, gains confidence as he embraces his past
and his present, being visited by an angel and dead
relatives and being declared a prophet. In the end,
perhaps Cohn is being punished—not for being gay,
but for hiding his true identity.
Although there are many different methods by
which authors deal with illness in their texts, it is
such an important, unavoidable part of real life that it
always serves as a powerful device. Depictions of ill-
ness can carry hope, despair, and grief; they can illu-
minate difference and similarity; and they can most
powerfully display the experience of being human.
See also Capote, Truman: in coLd bLood;^
Cather, Willa: o pioneers!; Hawthorne,
Nathaniel: house oF the seven GabLes, the;
Ibsen, Henrik: doLL’s house, a; Lessing, Doris:
GoLden notebook, the; Poe, Edgar Allan:
“Fall of the House of Usher, The”; “Tell-Tale
Heart, The”; Fitzgerald, F. Scott: tender is
the niGht; Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: yeL-
Low waLLpaper, the; Rhys, Jean: wide sarGasso
sea; Silko, Leslie Marmon: cereMony; Sinclair,
Upton: JunGLe, the; Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers
and sons; Steinbeck, John: oF Mice and Men.
FURTHER READING
Felman, Shoshana. Writing and Madness (Literature/
Philosophy/Psychoanalysis). Translated by Marthaillness 57